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Passover 2025 begins on the evening of Saturday, April 12, and runs through Sunday, April 20. This is now the second Passover since Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and a massive propaganda campaign began to convince the world that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state that is illegally occupying land that belongs to the “Palestinians,” who are supposedly the indigenous people of the land.
And so as Jews around the world once again read the Passover Haggadah, which tells the foundational story of their liberation from slavery in Egypt, they will once again repeat the concluding statement of the Passover Seder, just as they have repeated it throughout the ages: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
This indelible phrase is a reminder to the world, if the world were interested in paying attention, of the fact that Zionism did not begin in 1948, with the founding of the modern state of Israel, or in the nineteenth century with the work of pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl. No, Zionism, the aspiration of the Jews to return to their homeland, is many centuries older than either one, and older also than the “Palestinian people,” a KGB propaganda invention of the 1960s.
Zionism is older than the Ottoman Empire, the now-dead Islamic caliphate that did all it could to prevent the nineteenth-century Zionist movement from attaining its goals. It is older than the United States of America, on which today’s haters of Jews and Israel insist that the Jewish state now depends for its existence. It is older than the religion of Islam, on which, with its deeply rooted hatred of Jews, the “resistance” of the “Palestinian” people is actually based, although Western policymakers steadfastly ignore this fact.
Whose land is it? Well, which people has longed to return there for twenty centuries and more?
Yet as Passover begins once again, the voices insisting that Israel has no right to the land it inhabits, and that the Jews there are white supremacist, colonialist occupiers, are more insistent than ever. As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, the October 7 jihad massacre was the occasion for a clearly carefully planned recrudescence of Jew-hatred, including the reappearance of ancient lies that most people thought had died in the ashes of Berlin in April 1945. But this antisemitism is, as always, based on lies.
Sometimes these lies come from Jews themselves who have exchanged their faith and traditions for the hysteria, self-righteousness, and mendacity of modern-day leftism. On Thursday, the organization Stop Antisemitism posted on X this shot across the bow to anti-Israel Jews: “It is impossible to have an anti-Zionist Passover. The Exodus from slavery in Egypt was a journey toward Zion – the land promised by G-d. Remove that, and you reduce yourself to a shallow dinner gathering led by the historically illiterate … a perfect description of every member of Jewish Voice for Peace! Just a reminder: the admins behind JVP are operating out of Lebanon. They are a complete fraud. Their goal isn’t peace, it’s the erasure of the Jewish state.”
To that, Zachary Foster, a far-left ideologue who calls himself a “historian of Palestine,” responded: “It is impossible to have a Zionist seder. You cannot celebrate freedom while supporting the enslavement of millions of Palestinians.” What? You didn’t know that Israel had enslaved millions of Palestinians? You’re not alone: this is a destructive falsehood without the slightest basis in reality, but that’s the sort of thing that plays on the left these days, and is a common feature, as Antisemitism: History and Myth illustrates, of antisemitic myths throughout the ages. In a follow-up post, Foster made another outlandish claim, saying that Israel was “the most genocidal state and society on planet earth.” It doesn’t matter how outlandish the claim is; if it makes Jews look bad, it will circulate, presented as the real truth that the Jewish elites don’t want the public to know.
Passover is a testimony to the resilience of the Jewish people throughout history in the face of such lies. People try to destroy them, and kill many, and yet they endure. They face murderous enemies and skillful propagandists spreading lies against them, and through it all, they persist. They maintain their cherished beliefs and traditions, and continue every year to look forward to the day that they will finally celebrate the feast in their own land: next year in Jerusalem.
They have to take back the Temple Mount before they can really claim Jerusalem as their own. Next year, hopefully. It’s like San Francisco in the paws of the leftists. They aren’t Judea or America like this.
The deliverance from Egypt has not been forgotten to this day. And Jesus died, paying the ransom, paying back the perfect human life that Adam so tragically lost, on the day of the Passover.
So today, after sunset, the Memorial of Jesus’ sacrificial death will be celebrated in Kingdom Halls worldwide,
The ransom sacrifice was given for all of us, the damaged children of Adam, so all are welcome to attend.
They have to take back Hebron as well.
I would support ceding Bethlehem to UNARMED Christians as a protectorate.
What’s wrong with armed Christians? We don’t want to hurt you. We just want to defend ourselves.
Hello Allan. By definition, aren’t followers of Christ unarmed?
“A careful review of all the information available goes to show that, until the time of Marcus Aurelius [Roman emperor from 161 to 180 C.E.], no Christian became a soldier; and no soldier, after becoming a Christian, remained in military service.”—The Rise of Christianity (London, 1947), E. W. Barnes, p. 333.
Ephesians 6:12 says: “because we have a struggle, not against blood and flesh, but against the governments, against the authorities, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places.”
Our struggle is a spiritual one, not against our fellow humans, who are our brothers and sisters, but against “the world rulers of this darkness”, against the hands that really pull the strings. They are not human hands, and they work to divide us with tragic effect.
In contrast, Christian teaching unites us. Already our loving Creator, Jehovah, the God of Abraham, is teaching millions of us – from “every tribe and tongue and nation” – to live in peace as the brothers and sisters we truly are.
Is anyone else teaching us that, with any effect?
The 12 apostles carried the assault weapon of the day, swords. Jesus said to sell your cloak and buy a sword. Peter cut off the ear of the Roman soldier. Jesus didn’t say, surrender your weapon. He said, hold your fire. Not fighting for Rome doesn’t mean, don’t defend yourself. Jesus came to bring not peace but the sword. So Christianity is by definition militant. Tactics vary.
Hello Dan and thanks for the reply.
If you look at the context – Jesus’ imminent arrest – then didn’t he use those swords to teach a vital lesson?
When they come to arrest Jesus, Peter wields one of the two swords and attacks Malchus, a slave of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.
Jesus touches the ear of Malchus, healing the wound. He then teaches an important lesson, commanding Peter: “Return your sword to its place, for all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” Jesus is willing to be arrested, for he explains: “How would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must take place this way?” (Matthew 26:52, 54)
And indeed wouldn’t Peter have perished at the hands of the large group of armed men who came to arrest Jesus if he had persisted? And wasn’t that lesson understood by Jesus’ earliest followers?
What lesson are you refering to? Prudence as to the proper use of violence or the principle of non-violence? Jesus came not to unite, but to divide. Christian teaching unites Christians, and divides us, more or less, from the rest. Look around you.
Hello again Dan.
The lesson Jesus was teaching? Surely that our fight is a spiritual one, it is not against our brothers and sisters?
As Ephesians 6:11,12 says:
“Put on the complete suit of armour from God so that you may be able to stand firm against the crafty acts of the Devil; because we have a struggle, not against blood and flesh, but against the governments, against the authorities, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places.”
Don’t the Inspired Scriptures warn us that all the Kingdoms of the world lie in the power of “the wicked one “ Satan the devil. Isn’t that why we pray for God’s Kingdom to come? We need a perfect, loving and impartial rulership over the earth. And we need it very badly
A feminist “rabbi” I know is so woke, she wants to change the Kotel to the Kotex. 😃
I am surprised that I have yet to see reference to what was recorded in 1400 BCE: just do a search for Joshua 23 verse 4.
Mr. Spencer, I’ve read your “Antisemitism: History and Myth” (2025), and as all the other of your books I’ve read, it has given me a lot.
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” — Zuheir Mohsen, PLO official, Trouw, March 31, 1977.
I believe it was radio commentator Dennis Prager who once said he had the best short description of Judaism:
We were enslaved. Then we were set free. God helped. Let’s eat.
Bravo — historical truths and moral clarity from the inimitable Mr. Spencer.
Jews were living in a kingdom/state called “Israel” millennia before the founding of the supremacist, totalitarian, belligerent and pathology-laden ideology of “Submission” (which brazenly ripped off Judaism and Christianity, and, the, has the gall to vilify both faiths); millennia before the rapacious Arab invaders from Arabia (dishonestly re-branded as allegedly victimized and agency-/responsibility-free “Palestinians”) came to Gaza.
It’s not Palestine, it’s Israel. Period.
Wow. Cool story about how Palestine belongs to Europeans. Who knew?